SushiBot Rolls Out 3,600 Pieces per Hour

Suzumo's rice mound-making robot. Rest assured, it doesn't harm any rice grains. "It does not cut even a grain of rice when forming," wrote Suzumo representative Takeshi Kawamata in an e-mail. For a company whose tagline is "We Love Rice," that might be an important consideration. Image: Gigazine/YouTube.

Would-be sushi moguls take note: Suzumo has a line of sushi robots that might fulfill your 24-7 maki-making fantasies. The Japanese company is displaying its machines at the World Food and Beverage Great Expo 2012 in Tokyo this week.

Suzumo, which claims to have developed the world’s first sushi robot in 1981, has a countertop machine that cranks out oblong rice mounds at up to 3,600 mph (mounds per hour), according to the company website. The machine features a top-mounted rice bucket from which the bot grabs a chunk of rice. It sculpts it into a neatly shaped pellet that’s then placed on a revolving platform. Eventually, a piece of fish will rest atop the rice, and the nigiri sushi will be ready to go.

Suzumo says another one of its bots can make 300 medium-sized sushi rolls an hour. (Productivity goes up as size goes down.) The machine takes rice from its rice bowl and presses it into flat sheets. A piece of seaweed, fish and veggies are placed on top. Then, at the press of a button, the platform, which looks like a white conveyer belt in some models, envelops the open sushi and rolls it up. Presto! The maki roll is almost ready. Now, the slicer bot just needs to cut it up.

Technician plays with sushi roll robot. Image: Gigazine/YouTube.

With its army of sushibots, Suzumo aims “to precisely recreate the handmade taste and technique used by an experienced sushi chef,” according to a YouTube video. But it’s hard to imagine high-end sushi restaurants lowering themselves to the depths of what is essentially McSushi. The mechanical sushi assistants are clearly geared more toward all-you-can-eat joints, high-volume supermarkets, sporting venues, hospitals or schools.

Automated sushi production appears to be a growing sector, as other companies have hopped on the sushibot bandwagon. Robotic Sushi, for example, offers several tabletop and industrial machines. And Taiko Enterprises, which has offices in Japan, China and the United States, produces several robots, including the Rolling Mate. The 20-pound contraption’s basic functions “reproduce the skills of the craftsman,” reads a company brochure.

Without doing a blind taste test or speaking to a sushi expert, it’s impossible to assess how closely these machines mimic a master sushi chef’s skills. But for business owners, this fast-food approach to sushi does offer some advantages. Standardization is an obvious benefit, especially for franchises.

Cost reduction is also attractive: Why hire an experienced sushi chef when you can hire a high school student for minimum wage to place a predetermined amount of fish and veggies on a bed of rice and press a button? Most machines cost at least a few thousand dollars, but over time, it might be cheaper to opt for a mechanical sushi maker.

Customization is another advantage. The machine’s operator — to call this person a chef would be over-reaching — can set the a roll’s thickness and length. A true chef can also vary these parameters, but perhaps not with the same machine-caliber precision. On the downside, interacting with chefs at the sushi bar might be a draw for some customers, so until these devices come equipped with voice synthesizers and speech recognition technologies, they might remain in the kitchen.

So how do the sushi robots stack up to humans? According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Joakim Lundblad is the world’s fastest sushi roller with a record of 12 rolls in two minutes. Suzumo’s-rolling machine can make about 300 medium rolls per hour, or 10 rolls in two minutes. That makes Lundblad the tentative winner. Without the exact specifications of the bot- and man-made rolls — or a head-to-head showdown — it’s impossible to make a definite conclusion. Plus, the sushibots have an advantage: Their “muscles” won’t fatigue as quickly as a human’s, save an electrical outage, of course, so in a longer contest, they might have a shot at the title.

All that, plus Lundblad is a freak of sushi-rolling nature. Other human chefs can’t match his output.

But, of course, the Suzumo machines can’t do it alone. These sushi automatons need humans to place fish and other ingredients on the rice bedding. This handicap decidedly plummets the robots’ cool quotient. How much more awesome would it be if tabletop sushibots could assemble a sushi meal from start to finish without human intervention? And if they could then deliver it to a joyful glutton via a sushi-porter, well that would be heaven.

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